Tuesday, November 16, 2004

"Personally, I blame the bloggers," jokes John Robinson about the Greater Greensboro Observer's chronicle of its own death foretold. The GGO looks to me like another underfunded alt-weekly without a clear reason for being, and that is a species that dies like possums on a highway. But I do think some new type of local blog alt media is about to arrive in Greensboro. I'm not quite sure what it's going to look like, how and by whom the information is going to be organized and the traffic routed, but the information itself is nearing critical mass. I've been talking to a friend who thinks I should seek investors and start a local blog business. I don't want investors, I want collaborators. I don't want to work for someone, I want to create something. Maybe the ACC Hoops blog discussed below is the first part of this amorphous new entity's sports section. Maybe that will spawn a Greensboro high school sports blog, and a NASCAR blog, and so on, and those will all be linked at something like GreensboroSports.blogspot.com, and that will in turn be a link from some central site or sites, including this one. And maybe that will turn into a business, or maybe it will be a collective effort that makes various people various amounts of money, or no money to speak of. But whatever is going to happen is starting to happen. 4:36:19 PM    comment []

ACC Hoops is blog started by Sam Hieb and me to cover ACC hoops. We want it to become a regular stop on your web rounds, worth visiting several times per day during the basketball season for a balanced diet of news, original commentary, conversation, and highlights from around the web. There will be permanent links to official and unofficial sites for every ACC school, as well as to major media outlets in all ACC markets, as soon as we figure out how to create a blogroll. 4:15:29 PM    comment []

A Little Urbanity: "The City of Greensboro has a pot of $100,000 (maybe more) it's eager to give out to neighborhoods. It's called the Small Projects fund." A Little Urbanity is a new Greensboro blog by David Wharton, a member of the Greensboro Neighborhood Congress and the Greensboro Historic District Commission. He also teaches Latin, Ancient Greek, and Linguistics at UNCG. 4:09:17 PM    comment []

Dean Esmay: "It astounds me how often so-called 'libertarians' and 'conservatives' automatically and instinctively side with corporations." 7:36:23 AM    comment []

Rebecca MacKinnon suggests a "'Blogger Corps.' Through it, bloggers could donate their time to help poorly funded activists or non-profit groups to figure out what blogging tools are right for them, set up blogs, and develop effective blogging strategies." Great idea -- and as with many blog notions, my instinct is to act locally. This is something that local bloggers can do with local groups -- in fact, it's something that Tara Sue and Ross are doing in a way already. I've suggested blogs to various local groups, some get it, some glaze over. More will get it if community bloggers evangelize the idea. Blog globally, act locally. 7:34:50 AM    comment []